


All the why's

by WahlBuilder



Category: Mars: War Logs
Genre: Age Difference, Diary/Journal, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 02:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19242073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Entries from Innocence's journal containing his musings on his past: before the war and after, before meeting Roy and after...





	All the why's

**Author's Note:**

> With gratitude to Salmaka, Mo, and Mara =*

Sometimes I dream of my parents, of the old me. But that Innocence is gone, left in the past. And I can’t remember my parents’ faces anymore. I know they are here, in my own reflection, and I remember the colours of them. Dad’s fingers stained with the darkness of ink at the end of the day, filling the small lines of his prints. The red braided bracelet on Mum’s broad wrist. The blue-and-gold service ribbon on Pa’s breast. But everything else fades—each day, each hour. I look and look and look at myself in the mirror and try to coax my fingers into remembering their features in my own. Perhaps I should leave them with that other Innocence.

We are orphans, the four of us. Me, taken away. Tenacity, rejected by his family (it was a mutual rejection, and his sister didn’t participate in it, but it started with his father). Roy, rejecting where he didn’t fit in. And Temperance, the best hound, nearly killed, left in the wild because he was getting too big. He is older than Tenacity, and most people leave such old hounds to fend for themselves, and though his moults are sparse, he needs help with them. I wonder if Tenacity had picked him because he felt a kinship.

At the same time, we have a family also. We are not alone anymore. We are each other’s family—and there is a whole crowd of people claiming bonds with us (and us accepting that claim).

How did I earn it? I know I’m nothing special. Anyone else could have arrived to that camp—many others were drafted. Roy would have protected some other person. I’m not ungrateful (Shadow, don’t take them away for my ingratitude). I simply don’t understand. Why, again and again, was I given… all this? Why me? Why was it my parents who were disappeared? And why was it me who met Roy and Tenacity and Mary and Charity and all others?

I know it’s no use thinking about it. What happened, happened. But it is so many things… Having met them, and fallen for them, and having had it reciprocated.

What am I? A soldier, a killer, an orphan. An artist, a writer. I tell their story—I try to, but I can’t capture Tenacity’s prowling grace or the fear in Roy’s eyes. Tenacity told me, but I don’t understand why Roy is scared of me sometimes. The reasons sound solid, but in my heart, I don’t understand.

I am just… Innocence Smith.

Anyone else could have been in my place.

Anyone else deserves this—them—more.

…But nobody deserves to go through what I’ve experienced.

***

When I was five, Pa took us to the Sitting at the Source.

There were several—perhaps a dozen?—Technomancers there and a great crowd seated around many low tables. The Technomancers were resplendent in the blue and gold—and yet it were not the garments with long coats and, as I learnt later, corsets. They were simple robes of striking blue with golden pants and undershirts. No wiring, no circlets even.

Three Technomancers led the ceremony, talking about Earth, the Colonists, Mars—past, present, future; and three ages, three generations for those tales. Was one of them Roy? I don’t know whether I would have remembered. He had a different name then.

The AllLights Square always had great acoustics, but then, it was something magical. Each part of the story told in a melodious voice—as though near me, as though each of the speaking Technomancers was near each and every one of us.

And then, the singing. It filled me with awe—astonishment and fear, indescribable, a sense of being small but there was nothing diminishing in that feeling—on the contrary, I felt like I was a small particle connected to other particles: my parents, neighbours strangers—not merely dwellers of the world, we were the world. The world was us. And the Technomancers held it together with their voices, like those powers that hold atoms together.

I couldn’t have put it into words then—but I am trying now, because it is the same with Tenacity and Roy. I am a small particle—but the power between us holds us together. We are the world, and the world is us.

***

It was strange to realise that I missed Roy, while I was running errands for the Resistance. I pushed away thoughts of my parents—even though Roy urged me not to. He urged me to not let the anger consume me. But I needed to do something, needed to feel useful… I was a fool. I didn’t see that the Resistance used the same tactics, even the same rhetoric as the army recruiters—only ‘Abundance’ was swapped for ‘the corrupt government of our country’. But as long as I was doing something, anything, not depending on someone (Roy), I could stop aching. Even though I should have let myself mourn. I didn’t want Roy to see my weakness, my tears—what would he think of me? I knew he wouldn’t think worse of me, I knew… But I told myself that my knowledge was wrong and he would despise me.

As I walked, ran through my home city, I saw places that reminded me about the life that lay in ruins, that had been stolen from me—and stubbornly, I pushed those memories away. And what else could I think about? I feared memories of the war striking me: once, the sight of the uniform and a loud bang sent me into a space, in my own head, that bit into me—and I came to my senses disoriented, with one of Miss Charity’s boys calling me with concern. He took me to the gazebo, and Miss Charity brought me tea and told me funny, embarrassing and probably wildly untrue stories of Roy, of his friend Tenacity the head-hunter. She talked and talked until my belly hurt from laughter.

She told me that Tenacity had recently kidnapped her, locked her up, and a fight with Roy—‘all posturing and barking, my dear, and none of the bite’—ensued, with Roy triumphant and Tenacity pledging allegiance, and she told me how Mary had found Roy, and she told me other things, and I was writing it down as quickly as I could, keeping my fingers busy with the pen and my mind busy with the task of finding the words—because I knew that, if I paused even for a moment, I would bawl like a baby, and I knew that Miss Charity wouldn’t scold me for that either.

She offered me to stay with her people for the night, but I needed to report to my handler, and I feared that if I stayed, I would be unable to resist the temptation of waiting for Roy.

I walked through the city I knew and didn’t want to remember, and missed Roy.

I wanted to ask him about his favourite places in the city, whether he had any, but I didn’t want to remind him of anything bad—though Miss Charity’s stories told me that maybe not everything in Shadowlair reminded Roy of something he didn’t want to bring up.

I missed his quiet, reassuring presence, his voice scraped by sand, his eyes, the frown that smoothed when I caught him looking at me.

I walked through the city that had forgotten about me, and I didn’t want to be there. I felt like a stranger, even though I knew these streets.

It was that those streets didn’t know me anymore.

I had been made into a killer ostensibly to protect these street from a potential threat that, if the propaganda officers were to be believed, was inevitable, right there. My hands were more used to the feeling of a rifle than a pen or a pencil, though gradually I was familiarising myself once again with those tools of a boy who had faded into the past.

I wanted to see Roy. He hadn’t forgotten about me, he didn’t forget me.

So I hoped.

His words, when we had just arrived to Shadowlair, didn’t leave my mind. ‘You sure your parents are going to be okay with someone like me coming round?’ By the Shadow and the spirits, yes!.. So I had thought. I had wanted them to welcome him because I wanted to give back what he’d brought to me. A sense of safety, peace.

And now, what did I have to give?

I missed him so badly.

Then the attack on the train happened.

***

The old Innocence would have been frightened by Tenacity. He is a person cultivating a particular image. But Miss Charity’s stories eased that fear for me—and brought another worry. It went all but spoken aloud—laced with Miss Charity’s bitterness as a friend—that Roy and Tenacity had a history. Of adventures and of feelings that went, to Miss Charity’s very vocal displeasure, unacknowledged, and damaging for that.

I understand her displeasure well now, even though the situation has changed. But then, when I saw a big, imposing figure walking alongside Roy, with the infamous crossrifle over the shoulder, flanked by a giant, scarred red-black hound, my heart sank. My infatuation with Roy was a burden and a secret—although, now that I think on it, Miss Charity’s remarks should have made it obvious to me that my feelings weren’t as discreet as I thought.

But what could my… puppy love (kitten love, according to Tenacity), a thing that I couldn’t name because I didn’t know whether it was hero worship (with full understanding of my hero’s flaws), or genuine affection… What could I give to someone as reserved and complex as Roy—when there was someone walking by his side with a tumultuous history of feelings, unacknowledged as I knew, possibly unwanted? If Roy had rejected someone who’d known him for so long, surely I…

But I missed Roy. I had thought I would never see him again.

When Devotion had escorted me to a train, she gave me a long look and advised to forget about Roy. Technomancers burn your heart alive.

How could I? Roy was my friend. My family, my protector, my companion—and he needed protection, too. How could they not see it? How could they not see how scared he was?

He was my responsibility.

I didn’t want him to vanish. I told myself it wasn’t selfish, to want to see him.

And then Roy came, he found me—and walked into New Hope, a village in the middle of nowhere,—and at his side was someone who had protected Roy before I could. His friend, rival, companion, his mentor of old; the man who put his life at risk, staked his reputation for Roy.

They saw me—Roy saw me—and his steps were fast, and maybe I imagined it, but I think sparks danced on his fingers, and he gripped my journal in his bare hand.

I looked away—to Tenacity. I couldn’t bear Roy reading in my eyes just how much I missed him, my longing laid bare—even though I knew he couldn’t read faces.

I looked at the head-hunter—and wondered at the story Miss Charity had told me. She said, there had been dogs, small dogs, fighting Roy with Tenacity—but there was just one huge hound. She had said, Tenacity had struck a pose—but looking at him I didn’t think he was someone to strike a pose. Not to Roy.

Tenacity’s eyes were so light-blue they were almost colourless, and intelligent as a hound’s. Keen. His huge jacket, the scarf on his broad hips, his neckerchief, his beard, brows, hair, even his eyelashes—all were a deep crimson-black, like the hide of his hound, and the jacket was heavy and thick like the plates of the hound’s carapace.

He seized me with his gaze, and I stood firm. He drawled, ‘You are his Innocence.’ And grinned at his own awful little joke and stuck out his hand. His grip was careful, and he didn’t draw attention to the colour that must have been on my cheeks.

He is the best friend one can even wish for, an attentive lover, a loyal protector. A terrible flirt. I need him as much as I need Roy, the three of us are destabilised when even one is absent (the physical distance doesn’t matter, it is the connection between us that counts).

It is interesting to see when Tenacity shows the face he has constructed. It is not entirely disconnected from him: it is based on the truths and traits he has, rooted in the reality of him. But it is less him than he’d like to admit. He can be a bloody awful bastard even in reality—but he’s not as bad as he claims. Goodness is in one’s actions, so I’ve been told, so I’m settling to realise. Tenacity does many good things.

I visited Venerable Sagacity’s lecture once, and ey talked about a common belief among the Earthians that a deity (or sometimes deities) makes matches in heaven. It is a hard work.

Perhaps is it true and the three of us are such a match.

It seems that my falling for Tenacity was inevitable.

His voice spelt out (drawled out?) my doom. It was a different shade from what I felt for Roy, but at its core, it was the same.

I wanted them, and I knew that Tenacity understood, saw it with his keen eyes—and yet not one of us acted on any of it, and we were, me and Tenacity, locked in uncertainty and ready to swallow it up, bury it forever—what we had for Roy, and what was developing between us for each other. The latter could develop on its own, but felt wrong to act on without the former, without Roy.

I was faint with love.

Tenacity called me ‘kid’, ‘kitten’ (he still does), covering up his pain with jokes and roughness, pretending he didn’t care, that it wasn’t personal. And I saw—felt, knew—that it was so very personal; I knew that if Roy called, Tenacity would come, would follow him to the end of the world and beyond.

I couldn’t write or draw then, I just soaked in their presence and let the doom of my feelings for them envelop me.

And I read. I read my journal.

Roy had brought it to me and urged me to read it, and he looked like he was awaiting my judgement—and so I read slowly, because I thought he would disappear the moment the verdict would be given, whatever it was, and Tenacity would vanish with him.

It wasn’t an easy reading at first, in many ways. It took me days to start getting fluent in reading Roy’s unusual mirrored handwriting, words and expressions in languages I didn’t know followed by lengthy, pained, crossed-out and dropped attempts to explain those words. He had wanted me to understand.

And the drawings. Tenacity’s drawings. The intimidating, ‘bad man’, the head-hunter is an artist. In those drawings, the truth of Tenacity’s feelings was laid bare: all portraits of Roy were erotic, regardless of the theme—because they were made by someone who loved him deeply. Perhaps Roy didn’t see it—but I did. Both of us were doomed. I was guilty of making such portraits also.

I wanted to talk about it with Tenacity. I wanted to work on something together. He had (he has) a great sense of colour, and an eye for plants, animals, landscapes—perhaps because he travelled so much and spent more time among rocks and wild animals than among people.

But I was running out of time. Roy awaited judgement, and there were not many pages left.

He wrote of his surprise at my portrait of him in word and in colour. He wrote of guilt—the guilt I wanted to absolve him of. I wasn’t angry—by the Shadow, I had been scared and I had missed him, I missed him, I missed, him. But I hadn’t been angry.

***

I knew they were aware that I had finished reading. I was stalling.

We had shared a small house for a week, and I was stalling. There were so many empty houses in New Hope. Nobody bothered us; nobody knew us. We were on our own, in our own world.

I didn’t want them to leave.

I wanted to leave with them. Roy’s entries, and Miss Charity’s also, stated what I had already suspected: we had to move. We couldn’t trust the word of a man who executed his friend without trial, who locked away the Technomancers as though they were state property. We could trust Miss Charity to make sure Mary was safe, but we had to move, the three of us.

I am so used to this ‘us’ now, though I didn’t dare hope for it then.

It made sense to go our separate ways—forever.

But I was stalling.

The thought of losing them filled my legs with lead. It wasn’t just that I had nobody else.

I remember it vividly in some aspects, though not others. The room heated up by the daylight—was it the biggest room, the one that served as a kitchen, and a sleeping space for Roy? Tenacity slept outside, I remember, in a sleeping bag and with Temperance. Yes, I think it was that room. Certainly not the bedroom I used. I think Temperance was outside, happily chasing the local locusts. I think it was evening or afternoon. I remember that light made Roy’s eyes so very beautiful, the way it does sometimes: one the fierce blazing blue of the sunrise, ready to burn me to cinders; the other, the gold of the distant mountains illuminated by the sun about to roll down for the night. Deadly and life-giving. And the ethereal quality of the colours only underscored the haunted look in his eyes, the shadows under them, the sharpness of his features. He looked both so young and so old—human and eternal.

Tenacity was there also. His eyes, darker than usual, watched me, watched us. I noted a tight ring of his hair at the left side of his neck. I wanted to pull it, see whether it would coil back.

‘You have finished reading,’ Roy said. He pressed his hands into his thighs, palms flat. The black glove on his left hand creaked; his right hand was strangely pale in contrast, perhaps from how tightly he was pressing it. Without a frown he looked so soft and fragile, not at all beatific like some Technomancers I had seen, but he reminded me of them nonetheless. Human and divine. But mostly—human.

‘What is your… conclusion? What do you want to do?’

The journal lay on my lap, a familiar weight. Only then I noticed an embossing on the leather cover in the top right corner: three interlinked circles arranged in a triangular fashion. I didn’t know then whose work it was and why they had done it. Later, I would recognise Tenacity’s hand.

That journal was my protection and my damnation, my respite and a gift from my friends. I wanted to read from the start again, even though some pages brought shame and others summoned horrors—I wanted to start reading once more to stall.

I looked up and caught Tenacity’s gaze. He was dangerous, I knew—but not to me.

‘He wants to kiss you, Roy,’ Tenacity said, his voice a rumble of a quake.

I couldn’t meet Roy’s eyes. Perhaps it was for the best that Tenacity had exposed my secret. I would have done it in a more shameful manner—I was grateful for Tenacity’s interference.

I only saw, on the periphery of my vision, how Roy shifted. I could barely breathe and my cheeks burned, my sides were heated up under my shirt.

‘And I,’ Tenacity continued, his voice tectonic, ‘want to kiss you, too, Roy. You—and him. But whether or not it would happen, is for you to decide.’

The words, the tone confirmed to me what I felt was the truth of Tenacity: a clever, well-educated hound of a man—or man of a hound?—and devoted to Roy to the last bone in his big body.

I waited. We waited. I wanted to run, but I needed to stay and to know my fate—like Roy had needed to know his.

He had come for his verdict—and instead was handed the right to judgement. Now, looking at it like this, I think that maybe we were not fair at placing it on him like that. Tenacity is ever the hunter, and he’d lain the plan carefully. Had Tenacity not been there… But I don’t want to think of it—it is too strange. He was there, he’s been here, he’s ours, and we are better for it.

‘What if I…’ Roy said in a voice I barely recognised, scraped raw—the voice that suddenly made my throat tighten: in that voice, he had called my name over and over as I had been taken away, by the train. ‘What if I decide to leave? To not decide?’

‘We’ll honour it.’

It was true a thousand times.

We understood each other, Tenacity and I.

I did look up at the hunter, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but maybe I should have. Tenacity was watching Roy’s profile with such unspeakable longing, such anguish in the depth of his eyes, and I shared it with him, that terrible sweet burden of being in love to the last dredges of my being. Then his face softened—just for me as our gazes met.

I looked at Roy—but he wasn’t looking at either of us. I saw his fierce profile, that frown that had etched itself seemingly permanently, but smoothed out quickly when he stopped frowning because, I know now, his body heals, gracefully, mercilessly, lending one of the reasons to the mystery of his appearing both young and old (never his biological age).

I imagined the crown of wires—and it suited him—but it was also not him at all. He was perfect like that: with a stubble of several days and the undercut of the Auroran Technomantic Order, with the notches on his temples but without the wires. One hand gloved, the other bare. His own name, his own shape, his own path.

And we were offering ourselves to be owned, to be his—but he knew, of course he knew, always naked to boundaries, that us being his meant him being ours.

I know, now, what it feels like, to be with only one of them. I know what it feels like to be without them at all. Had I known it then… Perhaps I would have run, as Roy would do later. Had I known how difficult it would be, and how fulfilling, terrifying, astonishing. That it would bring my self-doubts and insecurities to the surface in their crippling, ugly glory; that it would show me strengths I hadn’t known I possessed. Had I known all that…

I would have chosen them anyway.

Roy said once that there is not a world among all the possible worlds where he doesn’t care about me. And I know that there is no world among the possible worlds where I don’t choose them. Emotions happen, beyond control—but love is an everyday choice, a string of choices and consequences. I choose them, I choose them, I choose them, I choose them.

I know this now. But perhaps I pre-felt it then. In giving Roy the choice.

Some people told me that Tenacity and I are just satellites in Roy’s orbit. I don’t argue with them—they are not right but it cannot be explained to strangers. We are each other’s shield absorbing the damage, we are each other’s driving force. We simply are: a system of differences-equalities. Each might feel less from time to time, but it is only brought by a mood, an old nightmare, a dis-balancing. It is not ‘completeness’, as others say, each of us is our own person. But each other’s also.

‘A trine cannot be explained to outsiders.’

Then, I waited, and in waiting, the moments stretched, my fears, anxieties rearing their heads. Why would they want me? Why would they take me seriously? Did they even see an equal in me, did they see a man and not a ‘kid’, not someone only to be protected? Older than me, more experienced, independent… No, I reminded myself. They wouldn’t dismiss me.

Roy is lightning-quick in combat, but he needs time to make decisions out of it. And we were giving our time to him.

Then he looked right at me, burning me up, and reached out his left hand.

‘Then kiss me.’

The glove was not leather as I had thought, but something smooth, and it stung a little, but I held tight, I was on my feet, he pulled me close, and I went. It was impossible not to.

The old me… That Innocence wouldn’t have dared—but what did I have to lose? I had gone through hell worse than death.

Besides, he commanded me.

We kissed.

I remember that I held onto his hand so tightly, and I remember he didn’t close his eyes—and I was his.

Then Tenacity got up also and I couldn’t tell where the floor and the ceiling were because Tenacity put a hand on Roy’s right shoulder—they laced their fingers, Roy holding hands with both of us—and Tenacity leaned to me.

I remember the bitterness of cigars and the shocking softness of his beard and whiskers.

I caught Roy looking at us, when we separated, lips parted. I had never seen him like this before, unrestrained in his longing. It is a good look on him.

‘Jealous, Majesty?’ Tenacity drawled. There was teasing joy in his voice—something I would learn is a natural state for him. To issue a challenge to the world with his whole existence.

Roy turned to him. And smiled, and I saw how the teasing glint in Tenacity’s eyes retreated, his expression enthralled.

‘No. Enjoying the view. You owe me a kiss.’ And Roy lifted his chin, and Tenacity bent to him, as though it was inevitable.

It is a decision I haven’t come to regret. It isn’t easy, being in a relationship, and we are still learning. Sometimes one of us overcomplicates things, sometimes one of us forgets that it’s better to use our words than to hold everything in and melt in the acid of our doubts.

It could have been anyone else.

I’m glad it is I.


End file.
